How to Read Sheet Music

This section is a work in progress.  You should probably just come back later.

:P

 

Simple

Visual Crash Course:

 

Notes - Timing

Rests

Treble Clef

Bass Clef

Sharps

Flats

Time Signature

 

Advanced (another page)

 

While much of the music on TabNabber is in "Piano Tab" notation, we have the technology to:
   Turn a piano tab into sheet music
     - and - 
   Turn a guitar tab into sheet music

 

Also see:
   How to read piano tabs
     - and - 
   How to read guitar tabs

 

 

Sheet music is read from left to right (notes above and below each other are played simultaneously).

 

Sight Reading Sheet Music:

Advanced sheet music readers don't really identify all the note names as they play a piece of music (from what I'm told, I'm no expert!).  

Part of reading music is converting the notes into their note names (in your head) and then finding the note's key on the piano, but another way to do it is to just know that a note equals a specific key (so you don't even think about the name of the note).

To quote a real pianist: "Mostly it's by distance...how far apart one note is from another and moving that distance on the piano... if you work on quickly identifying intervals in sheet music and separately work on moving intervals on the piano with your hands without looking then put the two together it'll help with your sight reading"

 

A 49 key keyboard.  "c4" (a step up from "b3") means note "c" on octave "4" which is the c key in the middle of the keyboard.  Notice how I have labeled the notes / octaves. View more keyboard layouts.

Here's a simple example of sheet music - the scale of "f" played on two octaves:

 

 

Sheet music symbols

Staccato

 

 

Games to help you learn to read sheet music:

 

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